


so, so little

by wastelandzbaby



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Adopted Sibling Relationship, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Bonding, Character Study, Coping, Drabble, Emotional, Emotional Baggage, Family Feels, Feels, Implied/Referenced Character Death, No Apocalypse, No Apocalypse (Umbrella Academy), No Dialogue, No Incest, No Plot/Plotless, Number Five | The Boy-centric, POV Third Person, POV Vanya Hargreeves, Post-Season/Series 01 AU, Sibling Bonding, Sibling Love, Trauma, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Vanya Hargreeves-centric, five and vanya bond over being tiny and sad, this is a vent fic jsyk, well. mild plot.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-05-20
Packaged: 2020-03-08 18:16:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18900013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wastelandzbaby/pseuds/wastelandzbaby
Summary: Five was little - so painfully little that it hurt Vanya to look at him, sometimes, because he'd always seemed so big when she was young.





	so, so little

**Author's Note:**

> so this originally was going to have a plot, but i wrote the first half just thinking about how fucking sad this show is, and then the second half was written a few mins ago in the middle of me Hitting My Week's Low, as per usual. so sorry if the tone drops a little. this basically turned into me projecting onto five.
> 
> i've never written vanya before, so this is kinda testing the waters - and it's still pretty five-centric, and has literally No dialogue, and is basically just a lot of description, but oh well. hope you like it!

Five was little - so painfully little that it hurt Vanya to look at him, sometimes, because he'd always seemed so big when she was young. He was strong and outspoken and rebellious, with a wit and quirk to him that nobody ever quite grasped the same way he did, and a voice that dripped with sarcasm and intelligence no matter how snarky he sounded. He was all sharp angles, from the padded shoulders of their blazers to the cut of his jaw, and had a certain fire in his eyes that made even the bravest of men back down when faced with them - and yet his smile, when turned to her or one of their other siblings, was sweeter than honey, an awkward smirk but overflowing with genuine care.

And when Five had disappeared, she'd left the lights on and set food out for him and imagined how he'd look, if he came home that day. At first they were minimal changes - he'd have a different haircut, or a new shirt, or his shoes would be a little scuffed - but then her imagination grew alongside her, and she dared to think of him ageing. When she was sixteen, she imagined him with a bright darkness to his eyes and an even sharper look to him, hair a little dishevelled in teenage rebellion, a little less stick-thin and a little more boyishly-lanky. When she was eighteen, she imagined him with the barest scrapes of stubble on his jaw, a slightly different rasp to his voice, taller to match his brothers.

She'd moved out by the time she was nineteen, and yet her imagination still ran wild whenever she found herself driving or walking by the academy - Five in the casual clothes he'd never worn as a kid, Five with friends who weren't also family, Five with a job and a home and a life - until it hurt too much to think of anymore, and she imagined him dead instead.

It wasn't a conscious decision, but it felt better in her head, that he was dead rather than lost. Dead people can't feel lonely or sad or scared, and even though she'd rarely seen those emotions on Five's young face, she could only hope he was as far from them as possible, six feet under where the world couldn't hurt him, where he wouldn't come home to Reginald and an empty house and a thousand missions and grudges.

It had been long enough, when he returned, for her to have forgotten how little he was.

Five wasn't little in the way that all children were little, with their small statures and slight frames - well, he was, but there was much more to it, much more to him. The largeness and power he seemed to hold in his youth was all but swept away, leaving nothing but a misshapen mockery in its place, and though Five stood with the same courage he always had, his eyes burned more with fear and anger than determination. It was almost unsettling how perfect he looked, how perfect he forced himself to be, straightening out his tie and pulling his socks up over his knees - he looked like a little doll, straight from the shelf, with pale skin and perfect hair, looking devastatingly small in his uniform. Vanya finds herself stumbling over his smallness quite a lot, because even his tailored uniform looks too big on him, as if it were made for a man rather than a boy - and he is a man, funnily enough, just one forced into a body too young for him, a life too unfinished.

Vanya often feels guilty for being glad that he's so young, but no matter how old he claims to be, she sees the sickening sadness in his eyes that reflects an adolescence he never had, an adulthood he never fully appreciated - and she's glad, secretly, that he miscalculated and overshot and ended up so young, because a thirteen year old boy has a lot more life to live than a fifty-eight year old man, and though he may be smart, he's anything but wise. Wisdom needs experience, experience that was ripped up from beneath Five's feet like a plant from a pot, experience that required living a life rather than simply surviving.

She's not one to talk about happy childhoods or fulfilling lives, but she at least had her few friends and her therapist and whichever siblings didn't hate her too much, for all the years she was alone - and what did Five have, a mannequin? A library that hadn't quite fallen yet? His own mind with a different voice, a different name, someone entirely new and entirely fake? Even by her standards, that's sad - it clings to her heart, a snake constricting its prey.

So he's small not only in his body, but in his mind, in the way he closes in on himself so tightly that not even air can escape, the way he clings to his little ball of nothingness like it's gospel and treats every shred of knowledge like it's crucial. He's desperate to stop hurting and yet uses it as a safety blanket, so used to a mix of pain and nothingness that he finds comfort in it, even now that he's been dragged out of that dark place - and it drills deep into Vanya's core, because she sees herself in him.

Her nervousness may present itself more in jitters and trembles than scientific mutterings, but it's still there, still glaringly obvious at the forefront of her personality; her voice wavers differently, small and uncertain, far more obvious than the slight tremble in Five's tone, but they're still comparable; she moves inwards in a more physical sense, centring everything she has to care about, and whilst he folds in on himself more emotionally, closing up is still closing up.

Five is so, so little, but so is Vanya, compared to a lot of people - so she holds his hand and lets him be little, broken and bruised just like her.


End file.
